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Scholarly investigations of the rich field of verbal and extraverbal Athenian insults have typically been undertaken piecemeal. Deborah Kamen provides an overview of this vast terrain and synthesizes the rules, content, functions, and consequences of insulting fellow Athenians.

David Mulroy's brilliant verse translation of Oedipus Rex recaptures the aesthetic power of Sophocles' masterpiece while also achieving a highly accurate translation in clear, contemporary English.

Challenges the often-romanticised view of the prostitute as an urbane and liberated courtesan by examining the social and economic realities of the sex industry in Greco-Roman culture. Departing from the conventional focus on elite society, these essays consider the Greek prostitute as displaced foreigner, slave, and member of an urban underclass.

A trade in Athenian pottery flourished from the early sixth until the late fifth century BCE, finding a market in Etruria. Most studies of these painted vases focus on the artistry and worldview of the Greeks who made them, but Sheramy Bundrick shifts attention to their Etruscan customers, ancient trade networks, and archaeological contexts.

This original look at the Roman love elegies of Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid engages postmodern and new materialist feminist theory to assert the significance in the poems of human bodies in all their vulnerability, sexiness, and materiality. This analysis underscores the impact marginalized characters such as mistresses and enslaved individuals have on the genre.

Ancient Athenians were known to reuse stone artifacts, architectural blocks, and public statuary in the creation of new buildings and monuments. These construction decisions were often a visible mechanism for shaping communal memory. Sarah Rous develops the concept of upcycling to refer to this meaningful reclamation.

Examines speech loss across all of Ovid's writings and the ways that motif is explored, developed, and modified in the poet's work after his exile from Rome.

Originally published in Germany fifty years ago, The Gods of the Greeks has remained an enduring work. Influential scholar Erika Simon was one of the first to emphasize the importance of analyzing visual culture alongside literature to better understand how ancient Greeks perceived their gods.

The Persica is an extensive history of Assyria and Persia written by the Greek historian Ctesias around 400 BCE. Written for a Greek readership, the Persica influenced the development of both historiographic and literary traditions in Greece. It also, contends Matt Waters, is an essential but often misunderstood source for the history of the Achaemenid Persian Empire.

Engages postmodern and materialist feminist thought in readings of three significant poets writing in the early years of Rome's Augustan Principate. In their poems, they represent the flesh-and-blood body in both its integrity and vulnerability, as an index of social position along intersecting axes of sex, gender, status, and class.

Reveals major figures in Ovid's ""Metamorphoses"", highlighting the conflicted revisionist nature of the ""Metamorphoses"". This title explores issues central to Ovid's poetics - the status of the image, the generation of plots, repetition, opposition between refined and inflated epic style, and the interrelation of rhetoric and poetry.

The foremost religious festival of ancient Athens was the Panathenaia. This work addresses the problems of its interpretation, discussing the seasonal controversy over the Parthenon frieze. The festival is also compared with others held throughout the ancient Greek world.

Latin plays were written for audiences whose gender perspectives and expectations were shaped by life in Rome, and the crowds watching the plays included both female citizens and female slaves. This is the first book to confront directly the role of women in Roman Republican plays of all genres, as well as to examine the role of gender in the influence of this tradition on later dramatists.

By turns outlandish, humorous, and scatological, the "Historia Augusta" is an eccentric compilation of biographies of the Roman emperors and usurpers of the second and third centuries. By analyzing it as literature rather than as history, David Rohrbacher offers a new and compelling explanation for this strange text that has long vexed scholars.

In this examination of Etruscan religion, Jean-Rene Jannot uses three major constructs - death, ritual, and the nature of the gods to present an overview of ancient Etruscan beliefs, including the afterlife, funerary customs, and mythology.

Demonstrates the varying conceptions of an institution that was central to ancient social and political life-and remains prominent in the modern world. This book contributes to understanding of the era and will fascinate anyone interested in depictions of marriage and the role and status of women in the late Hellenistic and early Imperial periods.

The first comprehensive volume to present visual representations of everything from pets and children's games to drunken revelry and funerary rituals. John Oakley's clear, accessible writing provides sound information with just the right amount of detail. Specialists of Greek art will welcome this book for its text and illustrations.

The contributors to this volume are members of the Hellenistic Sardis Project, a research collaboration between long-standing expedition members and scholars keenly interested in the site. These new discussions on the pre-Roman history of Sardis restore the city in the scholarship of the Hellenistic East.

First presented in the spring of 458 BCE at the festival of Dionysus in Athens, Aeschylus' trilogy Oresteia won the first prize. It is the only surviving example of the ancient trilogy form for Greek tragedies. David Mulroy's fluid, accessible English translation with its rhyming choral songs does full justice to the meaning and theatricality of the ancient Greek.

The sexualized serial murder of women by men is the subject of this provocative book. Jane Caputi argues that the sensationalized murders by men such as Jack the Ripper, Son of Sam, Hillside Strangler, and the Yorkshire Ripper represent a contemporary genre of sexually political crimes. The awful deeds function as a form of patriarchal terrorism, disappearing women at a rate of some four thousand annually in the United States alone. Caputi asks us not only to name the phenomenon of sexually political murder, but to recognize sex crime in all of its various interconnecting manifestations."

Taking a fresh look at the poetry and visual art of the Hellenistic age, from the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC to 20 BC, Graham Zanker makes enlightening discoveries about the assumptions and conventions of Hellenistic poets and artists and their audiences.

In 2004 director Oliver Stone's epic film ""Alexander"" generated a renewed interest in Alexander the Great. The critical response to the film offers a fascinating lesson in the contentious dialogue between historiography and modern entertainment. This book scrutinizes Stone's project from its inception and design to its production and reception.

Reveals the play as a key to Roman social relations centered on many kinds of slavery: to sex, money, and family structure; to masculinity and social standing; to senility and partying; and to jokes, lies, and idiocy. This work includes comprehensive commentary, useful indexes, and a pronunciation guide.

This is a comprehensive collection of material on sculptured statue bases which should be of interest to archaeologists, historians of art and of religion, and scholars of ancient culture (including athletics and gender studies).

This lively translation accurately captures the wit and uncensored bawdiness of the epigrams of Martial, who satirized Roman society, both high and low, in the first century CE. His pithy little poems amuse, but also offer vivid insight into the world of patrons and clients, doctors and lawyers, prostitutes, slaves, and social climbers in ancient Rome.

In his first book of Satires, written in the late, violent days of the Roman republic, Horace exposed satiric speech as a tool of power and domination. Catherine Schlegel argues that Horace's acute poetic observation of hostile speech provides insights into the operations of verbal control that are relevant to his time and to ours.